Parashat - Ki Tissa
By Malcolm Brummer

A number of familiar character traits are well illustrated in this Sidra, equally applicable now as then.

Today we are so used to the instant response to an internet search or e-mail, we get impatient if anything takes longer. Even our leaders are expected to perform instantaneously and given no time to deliver. The timescale may have been different, but the same impatience afflicted Bnei Yisrael when, according to their calculation of the 40 days and nights since Moses went up Mount Sinai, he was late. Overlooking the miracles of the exodus from Egypt, the Red Sea and the giving of the Aseret Hadibrot (Ten Commandments), they demanded an idol for comfort and Aaron reluctantly complied. No allowance was given even to Moses, the greatest of leaders.

Much has been said about the moral - as well as the economic - consequences of the thirst in recent years for ever more gold (money, in one form or other) as a goal in itself. Sadly, Bnei Yisrael similarly turned to the lure of gold in their creation and worship of the Golden Calf. The jewellery used in this creation was that which they had removed from Egypt - a form of self-imposed compensation for their years of slavery. What value did it really have? What was to become of it? Moses turned it into dust - a fitting comparison with much of yesterday's wealth.

Before that happened, of course, Moses had descended to the sight and sound of the idol worship and destroyed the two tablets containing the Aseret Hadibrot. These were a unique gift to the Jewish people carved by the hand of the Almighty barely six weeks earlier and responded to by the people with the utterance "We will do and we will hear". The Torah tells us that the people became grief-stricken and cast off their remaining jewellery when they heard the Almighty's response to the outrage of the Golden Calf. It is so often the case that we realise only after we have lost someone or something how valuable that person or thing was.

Yet all is not gloom because an altogether more positive attribute introduces the Sidrah. It seems strange at first that the Sidrah should begin with the command for every male over the age of 20 to give the half shekel. This act is after all referred to as an atonement, as well as a means of conducting a census, which suggests that the command post-dated the sin of the Golden Calf and the many deaths which followed. However, perhaps the chronology is irrelevant. The deliberate intention of the Torah is to convey at the outset of the Sidrah a message of a more acceptable approach to life, to which the people should return, a sharp contrast to the misdemeanours which are portrayed subsequently.

First of all, the half shekel was a modest (not a large and showy) donation of which everyone was capable. Secondly, the many half shekalim became joined into a collective pot of many shekalim, to be put to communal use - a contribution to the establishment of the Ohel Moed (Tent of Meeting) - which simultaneously acted as a place of worship and a permanent reminder of the conduct for which they were atoning.